Two Florida financial advisers, John Suddeth and Sara Perkins, say fraudsters stole their likenesses to lure victims into a stock scheme. On 21 May, Meta moved to dismiss their amended complaint in the Northern District of California, as Courthouse News reported. It told Judge Richard Seeborg the case should end now, and for good. “This is a case about impersonation,” the motion begins.
The stock at the centre of it was Pheton Holdings, traded as “PTHL”. The advisers argue Meta profited from the scam ads and did too little to stop them. They bring claims under the Lanham Act, California’s unfair-competition law and Florida’s deceptive-practices statute, plus misappropriation, unjust enrichment, breach of contract and negligence.
The law Meta keeps reaching for
Meta’s shield is Section 230, the 1996 provision that treats platforms as carriers, not publishers, of what users post. A judge already used it once here. In March, the court dismissed the original complaint on those grounds, the same reasoning that recently freed Apple in a separate suit.
Then the case narrowed. The advisers dropped their claims about the ads themselves. They now concede the impersonation happened only inside WhatsApp group chats, which are end-to-end encrypted. Meta calls that concession “fatal”. If the harm lived in users’ private messages, it argues, Section 230 covers it completely.
